blinkx Partners with ITN Source

Video search engine blinkx announced today its partnership with ITN Source, a professional video content provider based out of the United Kingdom. ITN Source, whose parent company produces ITV News and Channel 4 News in the U.K., has more than 800,000 hours of professional video content on a range of subjects, which it sells for creative projects and productions. Under the partnership, blinkx’s 50 million monthly viewers can search ITN Source’s moving image libraries and stock footage at www.blinkx.com. They can then download and purchase those clips at www.itnsource.com.  According to a blinkx spokesperson, integration is underway and should be complete in a couple of months.

blinkx will display targeted ads along with the footage using its AdHoc platform, which uses speech recognition technology to determine video contexts.  The two companies plan to split the revenue.  

"We’re thrilled to partner with ITN Source," said blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake in a release. "Through this partnership, we’re able to further our commitment to our users by offering them the most comprehensive archive of professional video footage on the web today."  

With the Internet’s increased influence and the proliferation of such video-sharing sites as YouTube, there’s now a greater premium on the ability to accurately search video data. Microsoft’s recent $1.2 billion acquisition of Norwegian-owned Fast Search & Transfer, which uses speech recognition technology from BBN, underscores this premium. 

"Media companies of all sizes have recognized the huge opportunity in distributing their video assets online, and blinkx is working with many of them – including ITN and dozens of others – to place relevant advertising against their video," says a blinkx spokesperson. "Also, we’re working with some of the top sites and portals on the Web – such as Ask, Lycos, Portfolio.com, InfoSpace and Real Networks – to power video search on their sites." He adds that "re-purposing technology built for the Text Web to navigate the Video Web doesn’t make sense – searching video basedon metatags is like judging a book by its cover."

Not only do video and audio mining capabilities allow enterprises to expand their content to a larger audience, they also open the door to new forms of revenue such as targeted advertising.